VLVL Takeshi

[jbor]

 >> I'll rephrase the other question: why does Pynchon include a woman in a
>> draped white gown in the airport scene, whether or not it's Takeshi's
>> hallucination? Is it just a dead end, a meaningless allegorical apparition?
>> Or are *we* being addressed, being told to "[w]atch the paranoia" as well?
>> Is there a reflexive component to it?
> 
> Could be. Since Takeshi never acknowledges the woman in white, never
> talks to her, and since the dialogue is not interrupted, and since the
> narrative is not within the frame of his mind, it's certainly possible
> that the woman in white is not an hallucination at all, but is there
> addressing the dear reader. Any idea what "regular features"  are?

It makes me think of Classical Greek and Roman statuary, those kore where
the features are stylised into a generic representation of "beauty" or
"femininity" or somesuch.

http://harpy.uccs.edu/greek/sculpturefemale.html

She's not a character or individual, just some random apparition. And it's
very very odd. There's irony in the fact that some strange woman or
apparition would come up and say this to Takeshi in the first place, or that
he would hallucinate it: that in itself would make him more paranoid, not
less. But it's the disconnectedness of this incident to anything else in the
plot or in relation to the symbolic repertoire of the text which makes me
think there might be a reflexive component to it. We desperately want to
know who she is, what it means; we're conditioned to expect significance. So
intent on uncovering hidden revelation and conspiracy in Pynchon's texts
have some readers become this incident is a little trick or joke, as if to
say that sometimes inexplicable things do just happen.

I'll have another look at the previous chapter, but I think that it's
definitely DL telling Prairie the story from p. 130, and that Takeshi comes
onto the scene at p. 142.

best